Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, August 13, 2024 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

Can I use my cooking experience for a graded exam even if the experience was not a positive one? The dish turned out badly, but it was still a learning opportunity.

— Julie Fitzpatrick

Answer:

Yeah, of course, Julie, you can use, and we have a lot of, um, students that will submit something like that. So they go through the steps and they try to make it, but it didn't quite turn up the way they wanted to. And the final dish as we'd asked it to be made, but they didn't like the flavor of it or something happened a little wrong on it, pardon me. Um, but, um, you're getting the learning experience out of it anyways, so it's a great thing to be able to, to submit for that. Just make sure that you detail out what, where things went wrong on it, right? So if something does happen and it's like, oh, I burnt this, or, um, I didn't like the flavor on this in particular, like the flavor part is like, we're not really concerned with that as much. It's like, okay, like you didn't quite like the taste of gar masala because it had the clove in it, right? So that's understandable if you don't like clove and the, you know, uh, I don't know the, uh, uh, broth had a clove in it. You might not like the broth out of that, but you actually follow all the steps through it and you made it perfectly. Other family members like it, but you particularly didn't like it yourself. That's fine. If it's a burnt dish or something like that, well you might not get full marks on it, but as long as you're describing the process and exactly what you did with it and how you know it went wrong, our instructors typically take that into account. So can you, uh, you know, um, use the experience for the exam, even if it was a positive one? Yes, you totally can. Um, now depending if it turned out badly, like out of flavor, that's, you know, kind of to be, to be determined if it comes out or it's like a disaster where it just didn't work out at all. Like you're, it's either burnt or the whole thing collapsed or something like that. Uh, that's kind of, um, by the basis, you know, like kind of seeing or by, uh, you know, it's basically per dish to be able to see how that works out. But feel free to do that. And if the instructor's like, eh, this is not what we're looking for, you can always uh, submit to the Supreme Court to be able to redo the dish too. But if you've already taken all the steps through it, you might as well submit it, see how it does, and then from that learning opportunity you can again do it easier or better the next time too.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com